Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of higher education, presenting both opportunities and challenges. It acted as a universal catalyst for digitalization. This (forced) boost of digitalisation creates both: Possibilities for increased inclusion of underrepresented student groups in higher education on the one hand, and challenges with regards to an inflexible overreliance on digital formats for other student groups on the other hand. This report examines the interplay between institutional services, student needs, and study modes, aiming to understand their impact on satisfaction and success in higher education.

Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on individuals’ later life courses. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in most German federal states. We analyze this quasi-experiment in a difference-in-differences framework using nationally representative large-scale survey data on 69,513 students who attended university between 1998 and 2016. Using both TWFE and weighted-group ATT estimators, we find negative effects of reform exposure on hours spent attending classes and on self-study.

Nacaps, the National Academics Panel Study, is a new longitudinal study of doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project aims at providing nationwide cross-sectional and longitudinal data on doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany regarding their study conditions as well as their career trajectories within and outside of academia. The Nacaps study series apply a panel design to multiple cohorts. Nacaps 2018 is the first cohort in this series of studies. In 2019, all doctoral candidates registered at 53 higher education institutions [...] Full Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:nac2018:2.0.0

This flyer on the prof*panel, the DZHW professors survey, provides an overview of the possible paths to a full professorship (tenured). This is supplemented by insights into the educational background depending on the type of professorship in our panel.

"The Student Survey in Germany" (2021) is a newly designed study that integrates three previously separate student surveys (Beuße et al., 2022): the Social Survey (Middendorff et al., 2017; Middendorff & Wallis, 2023), the Student Survey (Multrus et al., 2017; Multrus, 2021) and the survey "best - Studying with impairments" (Poskowsky et al., 2018; Unger et al., 2012). The study is designed as a cross-sectional survey with a long-term character. The new, integrated student survey thus continues the long tradition of the Social Survey and the Student Survey as important cross-sectional long-term observation studies for describing and analysing higher education and the student [...] Full Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:sid2021:1.0.0

Host country education can be crucial for the social integration as well as labour market outcomes of refugees and asylum seekers. To meet the same admission criteria for studying at German higher education institutions (HEI) as other international student applicants, refugees and asylum seekers can attend pre-study programmes at preparatory colleges or language centres of HEI. According to the self-determination theory, the satisfaction of basic psychological needs is relevant to learning motivation and success in educational contexts. This paper examines the differences in the satisfaction of basic needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) and learning motivation between refugees and other international student applicants, and the ext